Massive Effect Of EU’s New Copyright Law To The Public

The plight of passing an unbiased and impartial copyrights law, that would not impend technological development, and at the same time gives value to media makers.

This has been a longstanding and ongoing debate, and recently the European Parliament convened, however, they failed to pass a resolution due to several of its articles is leaning too much towards Media Makers (news and media publishing corporations, artists such as Paul McCartney who is a staunch supporter of Articles 11 and 13 of the drafted EU Copyrights law.

Supporters of the law argued that stricter copyright laws would give content creators more leverage against Internet giants such as Facebook and Google. These group of people has always complained that these tech companies are profiting from the work of others, saying “The real issue is Google’s market power,” said Lionel Bently, a copyrights law professor at the University of Cambridge. “The content industry feels it can’t negotiate on a level playing field.”

In some sense, I agree to that, these tech giants should be able to come up with an algorithm that enables them to filter out unlicensed content which is sort of what is being done now to please these content creator. However, these content creators, on the other hand, wants more, they want these tech giants to find these unlicensed (posts) and then ask the owners to license these post. Note that there are millions of posts from more than 1 billion users of Facebook alone, also these media creators want these tech giants to pay them a hefty fee every time an unlicensed post gets posted on their website.

Now for me, that is just impossible, and that also sets a bad precedent and in turns limits access to information online.

I do believe there are better ways of imposing such, these tech giants would close if they must pay these media creators for all posts that may even just close to relate to their content. Having their content on one of these websites is already free marketing for them, which in turn may not directly give them profit, but is sure as heck gives them the reach they need for it.

For me, it’s all about finding the balance to benefit both sides, I understand both, and as much as the current copyright law is concerned, it does not address issues from both sides.